Mad Ramblings

On Holidays!

holiday

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All Change!

Been hard at work the last 2 weeks redesigning my website – http://www.garytymon.com – As always I needed a refresher course on html and css! Anyway, its up now and working. Have totally redesigned the look of it, its now a black and white design to reflect the pencil artwork and the caricatures and airbrush have been retired, its now solely a pencil commissions website with a prints for sale section. I have also added twitter so I can post when my new artwork becomes available.

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Have totally redone the prints for sale section into simpler galleries with cart buttons below each thumbnail and also added javascript to a lot of the pages.

I now need to get some sleep…

more websites…

Christimas is nearly round the corner, which for means lots of eating chocolates, drinking lots of booze and vegetating infront of the tv. Currently not doing any new artwork pieces as im designing a couple of websites, one for M.D Woodturning which specialize in various wood pieces such as vases, goblets, clocks, bowls and stained work. Heres a sneaky peak at the homepage.

The other website is for my own pencil portraits and oil & acrylic paintings which hopefully will be going live in the next week or 2 and will put the links up for both websites when they are finished. After that its back to work on commissions and new artwork prints, hopefully doing a few more black and white portraits which seem to be going down well.

New website up…

New website is finally uploaded at www.garytymon.com. Have made several changes to the previous one, totally stripped the old site down and simplified everything to make it easier to navigate, out goes the rough design page as i mostly use that for this blog and was a bit redundant on the site and back in comes the latest artwork side panel on the homepage. Was going to make the site colourful and eye popping but i think the images do the job of that and so have left the colour scheme mostly white with greys and blacks. Added an appear/fade command to some of the jpgs on the pages and that works when it wants to! Probably the biggest change is including the addition of a javascript lightbox feature when viewing the jpgs rather than using a swap image script, think it looks alot better and can get alot more gallery images on the page.

Have to say was expecting it to be alot harder with all the javascript and spry elements but dreamweaver really makes it easy and the only problem i had was designing the menu button bar at the top. Initially wanted some drop down tabs but after lots of head banging on the desk and punching the keyboard, i gave up. Also credit card and Paypal payments are now alot easier, there was a bit of a bug with the Paypal checkout on the last one which made adding to cart abit tricky but have sorted that out. Anyway, thats the new website design, hope it looks better, think the last one was VERY graphic heavy and made downloading the webpage take ages. If you find any bugs, dead links or missing graphics… it’s Sunday, it’s my day off!

Back to school…

Well its that time of year again…. website updating. ArgghhH! Which means hours and hours of CSS and Javascript tutorials explaining website design and coding. I think ive gone through them about 4 or 5 times and i dont know why but once ive done the website redesign everything i’ve learnt seems to quickly be forgotten. Expecting the same thing to happen this time. Maybe its because i hate doing it… could be that! Anyway, its got to be done and tomorrow its back to school learning lots of dreamweaver tutorials with Lynda dot com know it alls!. My aim is to redesign the page layout and introduce lots of spry and javascript whilst keeping website loading times to a minimum. So this week and probably the week after i shall be drinking lots of coffee, pulling my hair out and banging my head on the desk repeatedly…

Invasion of the cats…

Halfway through the final artwork for the wine book illustrations, will post those when ready. In other news… 2 wild cats made home in the garden last year and have had kittens and we now have a cat invasion going on, 1 ginger one and 2 black ones, and lots of other cats that keep wandering in, 6 in all. RSCPA have been called, no one has turned up yet, bloody useless. Anyway, heres the mother with 2 kittens licking some milk i left out for them, and the black one in the background is nervous Neville… whose abit nervous.

Latest gossip…

Sunday – the day of rest. Was good to see Man Utd get stuffed last night by Barcelona in the champions league, Alex Ferguson didnt look too happy :o( and Doctor Who is getting more and more confusing – apparently Amy Pond is a ganger and has been since episode 1 when the Silence kidnapped her and shes now imprisoned in a pod somewhere and theres a woman with an eyepatch involved and shes having a baby and i dont know what the hell is going on… brain is frazzled. Anyway, summers nearly upon us, heres hoping for some glorious hot weather and not too many wasps please. As for the artwork currently have a couple more pencil portraits to complete before i start on some book illustrations week after next, 30 ish loose cartoony illustrations for a wine themed book, here are some of the rough designs i’ve been sent to transform.

Going to be doing them in a very simple and cartoony style like the Cover of the Connells album ‘Fun and Games’ and will post when i make a start. Also will be doing a couple more caricatures, not decided which ones yet but might do a Katy Perry or Cheryl Cole, and maybe a Shaun of the Dead or Blackadder IV. Also a Bruce Springsteen black and white airbrush will make an appearance at some point. Anyway, back to being a lazy arse for the rest of day…